


In Which Dirk Cannot Speak

by OverEmotionalFuckery



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Headcanon, free form
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-27
Updated: 2012-11-27
Packaged: 2017-11-19 16:47:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/575438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OverEmotionalFuckery/pseuds/OverEmotionalFuckery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>was talking with a friend one day about mute!Dirk, and I said 'what if Dirk isn't mute, what if he just.. can't speak.' </p><p>and then this happened.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Which Dirk Cannot Speak

**Author's Note:**

  * For [StriderStruck](https://archiveofourown.org/users/StriderStruck/gifts).



Dirk isn’t mute - he’s not physically incapable of vocalizations - he just doesn’t know how to form speech.

He figured out how to read, but not the way people usually do. Usually, when people read, you have that little voice in your head, reading the words. Dirk doesn’t have that. When he reads, he comprehends the concepts, and understands the words he’s reading, but he doesn’t hear them in his head. (Learning to read was actually pretty difficult, because he never learned the alphabet and how specific letters work together. He just learned what specific words meant under the right context.)

But one day, Pesterchum releases a voice feature, and Jake and Jane and Roxy are all like ‘yeah, let’s do this!’ but Dirk doesn’t ever turn his mic on, because he can’t speak. He makes up some bullshit excuse about it, and his friends just leave it alone, because they know they aren’t going to convince him to turn his mic on.

Dirk hears his friends speaking, and he really wants to be a part of that.

So he decides to teach himself how to speak.

He finds some stuff from an English-as-a-second-language course (some videos and audio files and some worksheets and shit). (It’s an immersion-learning course, which is where the book and worksheets and videos and stuff are all in the language your trying to learn, with little to no actual translations.) The stuff Dirk finds start out really simple, with short, easy to comprehend sentences, and then moving on to more difficult structures and stuff.

Dirk has to sort of re-teach himself to read, too. Because he hadn’t heard much English until that point, he didn’t have a voice in his head when he read. All of the sudden, he had sounds to put to words and concepts, and it threw him off for a while. He got the hang of it after a while, but for some time there, his thoughts were a jumble of concepts and words and sentence fragments.

He spends every possible second studying and learning. He reads some old pesterlogs with his friends out loud for practice (he even tries to imitate their way of speaking). (this might also be when he builds Squarewave and has raps with him.) At first, his words are really hesitant, and he stops a lot to make sure he’s saying the right thing.

When he’s finally confident in his speaking abilities, he mentally prepares for that night’s voice chat (voice chats have become a regular thing). He turns his mic on, and everyone is like ‘wow are you actually going to speak to us?’ and he talks and everyone is like ‘wow you’ve got a really nice voice! Thanks for finally talking to us,’ and Dirk actually cries a little bit, because his friends are great and he loves them so much, and it took him so long to learn to speak, just for them, and they really appreciate it, even if they don’t know that he literally had to teach himself to speak.

His friends make some kind of off-hand comment about how they thought he would have a southern accent, though.

Dirk immediately throws himself into finding videos of southern accents and learns how to imitate it, so that by the next voice chat, he has a slight accent, and all his friends think that he had one all along, but just pretended not to on that first voice chat.


End file.
